Paul and Lucy Spadoni periodically live in Tuscany to explore Paul’s Italian roots, practice their Italian and enjoy “la dolce vita.”
All work is copyrighted and may not be reprinted without written permission from the author, who can be contacted at www.paulspadoni.com

Friday, October 27, 2017

Padule di Fucecchio ‟marked for death” by soldiers who carried out their brutal orders in a dawn attack

Part 3 in a series on the Slaughter at the Swamp of Fucecchio.Peasants
living in the Padule di Fucecchio had no warning on the fateful day
of August 23, 1944. German soldiers armed themselves with machine
guns, rifles, pistols, grenades and cannons at 5 a.m. By dawn, they
had advanced into the huge swamp from all directions.Pellegrino
Cardelli, 40, and his wife Evelina Quiriconi were working outside
their house in the Capannone neighborhood just before 6 a.m. ‟We
heard loud voices in a strange language,” Evelina told Ponte
Buggianese Priest Giulio Tognarelli, one of the first on the scene
after the massacre. ‟Were they Germans? I warned Pellegrino to
hide, but he didn’t believe me at first.”Evelina
walked down the lane a little farther. ‟Then there was no doubt, it
was the Germans,” she said. Pellegrino fled into the bushes, but
Evelina had approached too closely. Two soldiers grabbed her by the
wrists and dragged her screaming to their commanding officer.

‟Her
desperate cries brought the attention of other people in the
neighborhood,” Tognarelli said. ‟but they weren’t permitted to
approach. The soldiers were all around, searching in the canals,
looking behind bushes, walking through the fields, with rifles and
pistols ready to fire.‟They
told Evelina that an Italian spy had informed them that everyone in
the Padule is a partisan, that the peasants all support the
partisans, keeping them informed—that the peasants in the Padule
are either helping voluntarily or being paid by the partisans for
their services, and now the soldiers have come to execute their
orders. All Italians in the Padule are marked for death.”The
soldiers speaking to Evelina were not exaggerating. General Eduard
Peter Crasemann and Captain Josef Strauch, having been wrongly
informed that between 250 to 500 partisans were hiding out in the
center of the swamp, gave both signed and oral orders to kill all
inhabitants. The German word used, vernichten, can be
translated ‟kill, destroy, exterminate, annihilate.”Some
of the soldiers didn’t strictly obey the orders. If they had,
Evelina wouldn’t have survived to tell her story. But that evening,
Tognarelli said, Evelina found Pellegrino lying dead, ‟his flesh
torn apart by ferocious gunfire.”Similar
events were taking place all around the edges of the Padule, and in
many cases, the soldiers were even more brutal. In some homes, the
inhabitants were ordered outside, lined up and shot dead—including
women, children and elderly men. In all, 175 men, women and children
were slaughtered; 25 were under the age of 14, and 62 were women.
Only two were partisans.Sixteen
people from the Malucchi family from Cintolese were among the dead,
including three children, Franca, 8; Norma, 6; and Maria, only 4
months old. In another location, 92-year-old Faustina Maria
Arinci, known as Carmela, who was both deaf and blind, died from a
live hand grenade placed in the pocket of her apron.Most
of the dead had previously left their homes in the surrounding
villages to live in the Padule, a place considered safe because it
was away from the inhabited centers, and the Germans rarely entered
it. Ironically, the slaughter took place almost entirely on the more
populated fringes of the Padule, Had there been partisans hiding out,
they probably would have set up camp in the center, where the Germans
never ventured.Dozens
of witnesses survived, and their stories have been well documented in
books and military investigations conducted afterward by both British
and American forces.

The "Casin di Lillo" has been restored as a landmark to
remember the massacre that occurred in 1944. A marker
on the side notes that it was the site where the Germans killed
a father and his 10-year-old son.

Giuseppe
Fagni testified: ‟It was day, maybe around 7 a.m. We heard shooting
from over in the canal. A dozen of the Germans were in the threshing
floor of the Silvestri house. A voice in Italian said that we all had
to come out of the house. Some were already outside. Some refused to
go out. The Germans began to fire, shooting three people. Others were
standing behind or to the sides.

Color photos by Lucy Spadoni

They shot Annuziata and her baby.
They entered the house and shot at the women in the kitchen. They
shot Gino Romani to death and my father-in-law, who was only wounded
and fainted. Then they shot one of their own soldiers, a
German, by mistake. They killed him. Some went towards the swamp with their guns.
Others turned back and carried away the dead German and said that we
had killed him. They killed Antonio Mazzei with the butt of a rifle.
Inside the house the show would make you faint. Ada Silvestri,
wounded, died a little later. Also dead were Giuliana, a 16-year-old
girl, and her father Angiolo, a paralytic. Armida Silvestri died, and
Gelsomina Silvestri too. Next to Gelsomina were her dead children,
Giuseppe, 9, and Rosella, a year and a half old.” (Source: R.
Cardellicchio, L’estate del ‘44. Eccidio del padule di Fucecchio,
1974).

Some of the survivors who testified at the trial against Crasemann and Strauch. Bottom row, third from left, is Baroness
Poggi-Bianchini, whose large estate had been occupied during the war by the Germans.
Source of the photo:“Summer ‘44” by Riccardo Cardellicchio.

When
the massacre ended around noon, the soldiers claimed to have killed
200 ‟partisans.” That evening, while grief-stricken survivors
were gathering up the bodies of their loved ones, the Nazis were
having celebrations in Ponte Buggianese and Larciano. The Baroness
Poggi-Bianchini, whose home was occupied by Nazi officers, said,
‟The day after the eccidio, the command organized a great party and
the military band played around the castle until late.” They sang,
laughed and cried out: ‟Vittoria, partigiani tutti kaputt.”Part 4 coming soon . . .

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First off, before you hassle me about our title, Lucy thought of it. Yes, I know some people may think broad is derogatory, but the etymology is uncertain and she doesn’t find it offensive, and it made me laugh. We have been married since 1974 and are empty-nesters now, which allows me to bring my submerged Italophilia into the open. We first came to live in Italy from February-April in 2011 and have returned during the same months every year. From 2011-2015, we lived in San Salvatore, at the foot of the hilltop city Montecarlo, where my paternal grandparents were born, raised and, in 1908, married. In late 2015, we bought a home in Montecarlo. We come for a variety of purposes: We want to re-establish contact with distant cousins in both Nonno’s and Nonna’s families, we want to learn the language and see what it is like to live as Italians in modern Italy, we like to travel and experience different cultures. Even if we aren’t successful at achieving these purposes, we love Italy and enjoy every moment here, so there is no chance we will be disappointed. I am grateful to God for giving me a wife who is beautiful, clever, adaptable and willing to jump into my dreams wholeheartedly.